Accountability and No Accountability to God

Accountability and No Accountability to God

     For a "true" believer, accountability is to God. When a believer sins, God forgives only with genuine repentance from the believer.

     With no remorse and no accountability to God, a believer only distances himself or herself from God. Today, many so-called believers have become unbelievers due to their “no accountability to God.”

     For an unbeliever, accountability is to the conscience, which is the spirit born with the body that lives in the flesh in the secular world. Repeated wrongdoings will sooner or later sear the conscience and ultimately cauterize it.

 A hypothetical "accountability" illustration

     Say, you were one of the last two persons at a bar. You were sitting close to each other. The person finished his drink and left the bar after leaving some cash on the table for the bartender, who, at that moment, was away with your credit card.

     

     You grabbed the tip left on the table by the man who had just left, and then “pushed it closer to you”

      

     The bartender returned with your credit card, looked at the money right in front of you, and said: “Thank you.”

     

     Did you do anything wrong?

     

     If you’d intended not to give the bartender any tip anyway, what you did had not changed the scenario—the bartender would still have said: “Thank you” with or without your tip in front of you, and she would still have received the same amount of tip. So, nothing had changed, except the “position of the cash.”

     

    Any rationalization of the above is the beginning of “no accountability to the conscience.” The reality is that one “minor misbehavior” with no accountability will often lead to many more serious ones with no accountability to the conscience. That’s how sins and crimes are committed with their “no-accountability” mindset, such as the following: the laws are made to be broken because some of the lawmakers themselves don’t comply or even obey the laws they’ve created; the police aren’t to be obeyed, because the police are corrupt, and often racially biased; the Church isn’t to be trusted because there’re so many sexual scandals among priests; God is neither fair nor just with so much discrepancy between the abundant and the lack; between the good who suffer and the bad who prosper and are seemingly blessed. 

     So, why should there be accountability to God?

    

     The reality is that in this world many have developed their own “no accountability” mindset based on their own beliefs, their own justifications, and their own rationalizations: “I am not the only one with no accountability; I’m just one of the many. So, what’s wrong with that?” They simply have no accountability for their wrong actions and wrong reactions in anything and everything in their lives.  So, the only way to cherish and preserve “your accountability” is to become a "true" believer in God, who will always forgive you with your genuine remorse and repentance.

Stephen Lau